I found it out in our garage the other day—my Creative Writing Journal from a high school class. One of the entries took me back 30 years and 450 miles away to my childhood home. I had written in large, teenage-style handwriting about a night I could still remember vividly as I read:

“It was late at night when I finished the last of my homework. I got up from the dining room table, switched off the light and crept down the darkened hallway. As I turned to enter my bedroom, I saw a soft light coming through a small crack in my parent’s open bedroom door. ‘Hmm…I thought they’d gone to sleep thirty minutes ago,’ I said to myself. Wanting to say goodnight again, I put my hand in the crack to open the door a little wider. But I didn’t speak. I only looked. There in the dim light of a bedside lamp were my Dad and Mom kneeling across the bed from each other, heads bowed in silence, hands folded in prayer. Seeing them praying made me think back to when they didn’t know God--to when none of us did. Now we all know Him. He’s a part of our family. Little did we know that for years something was missing. Actually, Someone was missing. Not wanting to interrupt, I returned the door to its former position, smiled to myself and went into my room. I put on my pajamas, pulled back the covers, knelt by my own bed…and prayed.”

Actions Better Than Words

Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Some child training, maybe even most of it, isn’t done best through words but through actions. Telling our children they should pray is one thing. Having them see us, their parents pray, is another.

I now have a daughter of my own. She doesn’t stay up later than my husband and I--yet. But when she does, I hope that one night, when she goes to bed late after finishing her homework, she’ll see a light coming from our room. Wanting to say goodnight again, she’ll open the door to see her Mom and Dad on their knees, praying. And then maybe one day, when her own daughter goes to bed late after finishing her homework….